Microsoft's Bing under fire for porn video access

Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, has caused controversy by allowing users
to see porn videos without leaving the site, once safety controls are turned
off.

Last week Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive unveiled Bing at the All Things Digital conference in San Diego, as a replacement for its current search engine, Live Search.Photo: MICROSOFT

By Emma Barnett, Technology and Digital Media Correspondent

6:19PM BST 01 Jun 2009

The site became available to users in Britain today, two days ahead of its official roll out date on June 3. One of its defining features is the functionality which enables it to auto-play videos in search results, when users hover the mouse above the stills. By typing in words with sexual connotations, once the safety search setting is off, Bing users can access porn films and other similarly explicit material, within the site. Other search engines, such as Google, do not play the videos within their sites, but provide links to external sites.

Upon this realisation, high profile technology bloggers, such asLoic Le Meur, pointed out the feature, prompting Microsoft to issue instructions via Twitter on how to turn on content filtering functionality for the search engine.

The ‘safe search’ is on by default, however anyone can turn it off with two clicks and no age verification.

Last week Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’schief executiveunveiled Bing at the All Things Digital conference in San Diego, as a replacement for its current search engine, Live Search.

The new search engine aims to better understand what users are looking for, and therefore displays fewer results in certain circumstances. A search for the website Facebook, for instance, would bring up just one result linking to the site itself, with the option of displaying further results about the site.